International audienceA model-based method for indoor mobile robot localization is presented herein; this method relies on monocular vision and uses straight-line correspondences. A classical four-step approach has been adopted (i.e. image acquisition, image feature extraction, image and model feature matching, and camera pose computing). These four steps will be discussed with special focus placed on the critical matching problem. An efficient and simple method for searching image and model feature correspondences, which has been designed for indoor mobile robot self-location, will be highlighted: this is a three-stage method based on the interpretation tree search approach. During the first stage, the correspondence space is reduced by virtue of splitting the navigable space into view-invariant regions. In making use of the specificity of the mobile robotics frame of reference, the global interpretation tree is divided into two sub-trees; two low-order geometric constraints are then defined and applied directly on 2D3D correspondences in order to improve pruning and search efficiency. During the last stage, the pose is calculated for each matching hypothesis and the best one is selected according to a defined error function. Test results illustrate the performance of this approach

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By primarily focusing on the perceptual information available to an organism and by adopting a functional perspective, the ecological approach to perception and action provides a unique theoretical basis for addressing the remote perception problem raised by telerobotics. After clarifying some necessary concepts of this approach, we first detail some of the major implications of an ecological perspective to robot teleoperation. Based on these, we then propose a framework for coping with the alteration of the information available to the operator. While our proposal shares much with previous works that applied ecological principles to the design of man-machine interfaces (e.g., ecological interface design), it puts a special emphasis on the control of action (instead of process) which is central to teleoperation but has been seldom addressed in the literature.

Most motion controls of mobile robots are based on the classical scheme of planning-navigation-piloting. The navigation function, the main part of which consists in obstacle avoidance, has to react with the shortest response time. The real-time constraint hardly limits the complexity of sensor data processing. The described navigator is built around fuzzy logic controllers. Besides the well-known possibility of taking into account human know-how, the approach provides several contributions: a low sensitivity to erroneous or inaccurate measures and, if the inputs of the controllers are normalised, an effective portability on various platform. To show these advantages, the same fuzzy navigator has been implemented on two mobile robots. Their mechanical structures are close, except for size and the sensing system.